As Grilling Over Flint Water Begins, Partisan Divisions Surface

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Witnesses at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the Flint water crisis criticized Michigan officials and federal agencies for their response.Published OnFeb. 3, 2016CreditImage by Molly Riley/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Flint water crisis fanned partisan tensions on Wednesday in both the Senate and the House, where members of an oversight committee grilled federal and state officials about actions that have resulted in fears of lead poisoning in children. The fight threatened to derail the first energy bill in a decade.

While there was bipartisan condemnation of how officials handled the crisis, Democrats and Republicans split over what the federal government should do to help resolve it. Many Republicans said they would oppose a Democratic proposal to add $600 million in aid to Michigan to the energy bill, a position that Democrats said was Republicans’ passion for smaller government gone bad.

“I don’t care whether it’s the E.P.A., whether it’s local, whether it’s the state,” said Representative Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, during a rare bipartisan questioning over the breakdown in public health. “I want everybody who’s responsible for this fiasco to be held accountable.”

As House members questioned Michigan officials, Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, scrambled to save a sweeping bipartisan energy bill that Democrats have threatened to derail if federal assistance for Flint is not included.

Many Democrats said the energy bill, nearing a final vote in the Senate, would not pass without the additional aid. “We’re united in the Democratic Party,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois. “We’re going to stop this bill if they don’t help Flint.”

But Republicans are balking. “It’s a huge earmark,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2-ranking Republican in the Senate. “I think it’s not something I could support. Flint has doesn’t have anything to do with the energy bill.”

The firestorm showed the potency of Flint’s struggles in an election year when Republicans are trying to attract a more diverse group of voters while Democrats struggle to paint Republicans as dismissive of the role of government.

Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, tried Wednesday to turn the Flint disaster, which he called “an absolute outrage,” into an indictment of Democrats.

“You’ve got your own government poisoning your citizens,” said Mr. Cruz during a campaign stop in Goffstown, N.H. Drawing parallels to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, he added, “Both cities have been governed with one-party government control of far-left Democrats for decades.”

Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, announced Wednesday that they would hold a debate in Flint on March 6.

In the House, over several hours of tense questioning, lawmakers sought to stitch together the chain of events that led to Flint’s water being contaminated with high levels of lead, particularly the failure to add a chemical to the water that would have prevented the city’s aging pipes from corroding and leaching lead.

Republicans, including Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, the chairman of the committee, sought to blame the E.P.A., while Democrats focused on the role of an emergency manager appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, to oversee the city, and of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality.

Mr. Chaffetz said he expected the E.P.A., by the end of the week, to turn over pertinent emails connected to Susan Hedman, the agency’s former director for the region that includes Michigan. She resigned this week.

Much of the hearing focused on concerns about the lead level in Flint’s water raised early last year by an E.P.A. official who tested water samples there, and why the E.P.A. did not quickly insist then that corrosion control measures be taken in Flint.

Mr. Chaffetz also said the committee was issuing a subpoena for Ms. Hedman and would make a second attempt to subpoena Flint’s former emergency manager, Darnell Earley.

“We are calling on the U.S. marshals to hunt him down,” Mr. Chaffetz said. Mr. Earley’s lawyer refused service of an initial subpoena late Tuesday.

The House hearing was one of several Mr. Chaffetz has convened at Democrats’ request, but many of them are angry that the committee did not invite Mr. Snyder to testify. Representative Dan Kildee, a Michigan Democrat who represents Flint, pointed out that under federal law, states have “primacy” for making sure a federal rule that controls lead in the drinking water is being followed by municipalities. “This is a state failure,” Mr. Kildee said in his testimony to the committee.

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Months after the city of Flint, Mich., switched from a Detroit water supply to one from the Flint River, contaminants have sickened people. Residents have filed lawsuits, and the governor has apologized.Published OnJan. 20, 2016CreditImage by Jake May/The Flint Journal, via Associated Press

Keith Creagh, the new director of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, and Joel Beauvais, the official in charge of the E.P.A.’s Office of Water, each pointed fingers at the other’s agency in their testimony. Mr. Beauvais told the committee that the E.P.A. “encountered resistance” from state environmental quality officials when it urged them to address the lack of corrosion control in Flint’s water. Mr. Creagh, for his part, said that technically, the federal lead-control rule would have allowed up to two years for corrosion control treatments to begin after the city switched its water source to the Flint River in April 2014.

“We were minimalistic and legalistic in our behavior,” Mr. Creagh said of the state Department of Environmental Quality. He also said the E.P.A. had waited months before providing a legal opinion that Flint should and could be required to have corrosion control measures in place.

And he cited an email from an E.P.A. employee last year that gave the department advice on how to deny having seen an E.P.A. official’s memo expressing concerns about Flint’s water

But some of the harshest testimony came from LeeAnne Walters, a former Flint resident whose tap water was found to have extremely high lead levels starting early in 2015, and Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech professor to whom she appealed for help after her concerns were “dismissed,” as she put it, by city and state employees.

Mr. Edwards testified that the E.P.A. had been “aiding and abetting” the Department of Environmental Quality’s “cover-up” of the problem. More broadly, he said water systems across the country were at risk of dangerous lead contamination because of weak federal regulations.

Ms. Walters, who said one of her young sons has a number of problems from lead poisoning, testified that the only official who took her concerns seriously was one with the E.P.A.: Miguel Del Toral, who laid out deep concerns about Flint’s water supply, and particularly the lack of corrosion control, in a memo to others in his agency and to officials at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality in June 2015.

The committee asked Mr. Del Toral to testify, but “in further discussions with the E.P.A.,” Mr. Chaffetz said at the hearing, “we’ve come to understand he’s very active in the cleanup as we speak.”

Ms. Walters testified that after Mr. Del Toral shared his memo with her last year and she went public with it, the E.P.A. had forbidden him to speak to her, and a Department of Environmental Quality official told her that Mr. Del Toral “had been handled.”

After the hearing, Mr. Chaffetz said, “I really do wonder if not only if people should be fired, but if some people should be put in jail.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Congressional Grilling on Flint’s Water Crisis Takes On a Partisan Tone. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe